South Florida taxicab operators sat down to a high-stakes poker game last week, with Dade County providing the table and all the chips. The preliminaries took the form of an informational meeting at the Metro-Dade Transit Agency; the prize, which will be awarded in November, is a contract, worth an…
Danny Faries, a winsome con man with a snaggletooth grin, ran one of the biggest telephone credit card scams in American history from a cramped cell in the Dade County Jail. During four years of incarceration in Miami, the 42-year-old convicted murderer used pilfered credit card numbers to illegally buy…
I shook my head, closed my eyes, and wondered if the blazing tropical sun — that hadn’t changed, anyway — had temporarily fried my brain. Slowly I let my eyelids slide back up. I was still standing in the lobby of Managua’s Inter-Continental Hotel, and for a moment the newsstand…
Betty Sime had Key Biscayne’s first mayoral election so deep in her pocket that several of her closest friends didn’t even bother to vote. “I had people the day of the election calling me up, saying, `Well, we’re not going to be at the election party tonight, but we wanted…
From where Patrick Snay sits, deep within Killian Senior High School’s administration building, he can’t see any of the surrounding campus. Then again Snay, Killian’s assistant principal in charge of administration, doesn’t need to. The black rotary phone on his desk, specially designated for “Rumor Control,” supplies him with enough…
Rare is the adolescent resident of a high-rise who hasn’t converted his balcony into a laboratory for a detailed study of gravity. Young inquiring minds, several stories up, need only the simplest materials to explore important scientific concepts such as the parabolic trajectory and terminal velocity of a soggy toilet-paper…
Oh, how we Floridians love exclusivity: the waterfront mansions, the crystal chandeliers, the caviar-stained revelry of Palm Beach estates and Fisher Island yacht fetes. Most of the time, of course, sniffing this rarefied air means paying through the schnozz. And here in the land of bonehead public policy, even breathing…
There are days when Ellis Rubin’s law office is the center of the universe for everything that is weird about South Florida. At any given time you might bump into Johnny Carson’s black granddaughter, the bald-headed man with the cure for AIDS, the girl who killed her father, the boy…
Irma Stone knows bounced checks better than anyone in South Florida. The phlegmatic 37-year-old has reigned for more than thirteen years as queen of the Worthless Check Division, a little-known bureau in the Dade State Attorney’s Office that tries to catch and prosecute habitual check cheats. But the Worthless Check…
What Eric Bogosian does isn’t hard to explain. In fact it’s almost too easy. For almost a decade, the 37-year-old New Yorker — a Woburn, Massachusetts native who arrived in New York by way of Oberlin College — has captivated audiences and turned critics’ heads by taking to the stage…
Shopping mall managers and owners have a phrase for the totality of what happens in their climate-controlled Edens: The Retail Drama. At some malls The Retail Drama is low comedy or pantomime or a degraded television sitcom. At Dadeland, twelve miles south of downtown Miami, it is high art. From…
When an anonymous reader sent us a photocopy of a Miami Beach Police Offense Incident Report, we treated it with the care and attention we give to all unsolicited submissions. Later on, though, we looked at it, and something about the report struck us as not quite right. By all…
This past summer Elio Rojas had a little problem: two cars and only one driveway. It was possible, of course, to park both cars in the same driveway, but that was an inconvenience, an inconvenience Rojas figured he could do without. So Rojas, president of Miami’s influential Latin Quarter Association,…
On September 23, 1989, Lisette Nogues, a consulting neurologist, and Andres Nogues, an aspiring physician and her husband of thirteen years, were accused by their fifteen-year-old daughter Aimee of child abuse. That same night, caseworkers from the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services (HRS) removed the Nogueses’ seven minor…
The next time you go walking on one of South Florida’s lovely beaches, your shadow shying from the neon-peach of the sunset, the shrills of gulls filling the dusk, twist your toes in the sand and take a deep breath of salt air. Then continue your walk, marveling at the…
In the early years of the 21st Century, Miami’s flourishing arts scene begins to implode. A string of once-lively neighborhood dance companies and playhouses shuts down for want of funding. The city’s giant downtown performance center, open for only a few seasons, strangles in debt. Middle-class aesthetes retreat to televisionland,…
The August 2 sleepover for nine-through-eleven-year-olds was one of the most anticipated events of the Miami Beach Parks and Recreation Department’s eight-week day camp. Campers at the Scott Rakow Youth Center had been promised dancing, a pizza party, swimming, pinatas, the requisite ghost stories, and a complete disregard for regular…
In places like France and Miami, never is heard a discouraging word about Jerry Lewis, his prodigious body of work, and especially his favorite cause, the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Naysay Jerry’s Kids? It simply isn’t done. For the past 26 years, Labor Day Weekend has been synonymous with Lewis’s TV…
Under what circumstances does the state have the right to take children away from their parents? To what lengths should the state go to reunify a divided family? In Dade County these questions recently prompted juvenile court officials to form a Family Preservation Committee, with the goal of avoiding “out-of-home”…
In seven years as a detective in the Metro-Dade Police Department’s sexual battery unit, Ellen Christopher has exposed dozens of criminals to the light of justice. But by the time she completed her troubling, seven-month investigation of Andres Nogues, accused by his daughter of sexual abuse, Christopher had no interest…
It sounds, at first, like a faint siren, the shrill announcement of far-off disaster. Only after the fourth or fifth tone do you locate the source, a beeper concealed beneath the clutter on Dr. Lisette Nogues’s nightstand. Two years ago, when Nogues (pronounced no-guess) was earning $300,000 annually as a…
Listed below are the names of Nogues family members, followed by other principal characters mentioned in this article, in alphabetical order. Dr. Lisette Nogues, 41, neurologist. Since November 1989 has been forbidden by the court to see her six youngest children, stemming from allegations against her and her husband, made…
